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A decade ago, the world braced for headline-grabbing attacks on airplanes, embassies, and business hubs. Today, militancy hides in plain sight. A WhatsApp group in Lahore, an AI-generated video in Mali, or a lone attacker in Paris can carry the same destabilizing weight as a bomb in Baghdad once did. The threat has not vanished; it has mutated.

To see where we are headed, it helps to recall where we have been. Modern ‘terrorism’ has moved through four eras: nationalist insurgencies like the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE); Al-Qaeda militancy that climaxed with 9/11 and the “War on Terror”; Daesh’s territorial “caliphate” that drew 40,000 foreign fighters; and today’s fragmented world of lone actors, drones, and hybrid crime–terror networks.

The Global Terrorism Index 2025 makes the transformation plain. Militancy-related deaths dropped 13 percent in 2024 compared to the brutal peaks of the 2010s, but instability has only deepened. 98 percent of fatalities now occur in conflict zones, as the number of wars rose from 69 to 91 in just a year. Attacks spread to 66 countries in 2024, up from 58 the year before.

Pakistan shows the uneasy transition: large-scale bombings in cities have eased, but border insurgencies and online radicalization are steadily on the rise.

- Syed Kaleem Imam

Four groups still account for 80 percent of militancy-related........

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